from the eff-opposed-the-lawsuit dept

There's been a bunch of fuss online over the "news" that Craigslist is supposedly donating $1 million to EFF when the money is not actually from Craig. It's from a startup that Craigslist has sued out of business, under a dangerous interpretation of the CFAA that harms the open internet. Obviously, EFF getting an additional $1 million in resources is really great. But it's troubling to see so many people congratulate Craigslist and Craig Newmark for "supporting EFF." Craig himself has contributed to this misleading perception with this tweet implying he's giving his own money to EFF:

Plenty of smart people are cheering on Craig for supposedly being so generous. But that's wrong. This isn't Craigslist being generous. This is Craigslist abusing the CFAA to kill a company who was making the internet better, and then handing over some of the proceeds to the EFF, which actively opposed Craigslist's lawsuit.

Now, I should note upfront that I like Craigslist and very much like Craig Newmark personally. I think that the company has been really innovative in taking a more long term view of its business (even if it's been losing ground more recently). However, this lawsuit was always really sketchy. It sued a few companies for making Craigslist more valuable. Those companies were scraping Craigslist data, but only to overlay additional information and always pointing people back to Craigslist. In other words, the companies Padmapper and 3taps were adding value to Craigslist in the same manner that much of the internet was built -- by providing more value on top of the work of others.

And yet Craigslist sued these companies under a tortured definition of the CFAA, arguing that the mere scraping of its data to provide value on top of it (none of which took away any value from Craigslist) was "unauthorized access." The EFF filed an amicus brief against Craigslist, slamming the company (which it has frequently supported in other circumstances) for abusing the law:

The CFAA does not and should not impose liability on anyone who accesses information publicly available on the Internet. Because the CFAA and Penal Code § 502 imposes both civil and criminal liability, it must be interpreted narrowly. That means information on a publicly accessible website can be accessed by anyone on the Internet without running afoul of criminal computer hacking laws. In the absence of access, as opposed to use, restrictions, Craigslist cannot use these anti-hacking laws to complain when the information it voluntarily broadcasts to the world is accessed, even if it is upset about a competing or complementary business.

[....]

Craigslist’s enormous success is a result of its openness: anyone anywhere can access any of its websites and obtain information about apartments for rent, new jobs or cars for sale. Its openness means that Craigslist is the go to place on the web for classified ads; it users post on Craigslist because they know their ads will reach the largest audience.

But what Craigslist is trying to do here is to use the CFAA’s provisions to enforce the unilateral determinations it has made concerning access to its website, an Internet site that it has already chosen to open up to the general public, attempting to turn a law against computer hacking into a new tool. But prohibiting access to an otherwise publicly available website is not the type of harm that Congress intended to be proscribed in the CFAA, and nowhere in the legislative history is there any suggestion that the CFAA was drafted to grant website owners such unbridled discretion.

That's the EFF directly arguing against Craigslist in this case. Unfortunately, the initial district court ruling agreed with Craigslist, leading EFF to note just how dangerous the ruling was:

There's a serious potential for mischief that is encouraged by this decision, as companies could arbitrarily decide whose authorization to "revoke" and need only write a letter and block an IP address to invoke the power of a felony criminal statute in what is, at best, a civil business dispute.

Judge Breyer’s opinion appears to mix up two different aspects of the CFAA. The first aspect is the prohibition on unauthorized access, and the second is its associated mental state element of intent. The CFAA only prohibits intentional unauthorized access; merely knowingly or recklessly accessing without authorization is not prohibited. So whatever unauthorized access means, the person must be guilty of doing that thing (the act of unauthorized access) intentionally to trigger the statute. Breyer seems to mix up those elements by focusing heavily on the fact that 3taps knew that Craigslist didn’t want 3taps to access its site. According to Judge Breyer, the clear notice meant that the case before him didn’t raise all the notice and vagueness issues that prompted the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Nosal.

So now the case has been settled, and, as a result, at least one of the companies involved, 3taps, is shutting down altogether. 3taps points out that it's 3taps, not Craigslist whose money is going to EFF:

As part of the settlement, 3taps and its founder, Greg Kidd, have agreed to pay craigslist $1 million, all of which must then be paid by craigslist to the EFF, which supported 3taps' position on the CFAA in this litigation, and continues to do great work for Internet freedom generally. Mr. Kidd's investment firm, Hard Yaka, has also committed to make a substantial investment in PadMapper to provide it with the resources to continue to innovate and serve the post-craigslist marketplace.

Although 3taps lacks the resources to continue the fight, this settlement provides much needed resources to the EFF, as there is still much to be done on the issues raised in this case.

For example, the question remains whether private companies that maintain public websites can selectively exclude visitors, exposing the banned visitor to civil and criminal liability under the CFAA.

Furthermore, this is unlikely to be the last litigation involving craigslist's copyrights, particularly given craigslist's current practice of selectively obtaining copyright assignments and registrations (the prerequisite to a copyright infringement lawsuit) in certain user-generated posts, but failing to inform its visitors which posts it owns. This effectively creates a copyright litigation trap for unwary visitors.

Finally, it remains unresolved whether craigslist's well-recognized practice of "ghosting" (the hiding or interception of user postings and emails) without the users' knowledge or consent is legal or ethical.

Given all that, it's fairly disappointing to see lots of prominent people backslapping Craig and Craigslist for "donating" this money to EFF. It's not Craig's money. And, according to the settlements, it appears that the $1 million isn't all that Craigslist is getting. That's just the money 3taps is paying. Another company in the dispute, Lovely, is paying an additional $2.1 million. It's unclear if Craigslist is giving that money to EFF or anyone else -- or keeping it.

Again, on most issues, I think Craig and Craigslist are on the right side of things. He fought strongly against SOPA and for net neutrality. I think the company does the right thing in many cases, but in this case it clearly did not, and the fact that people are now cheering him on when it's not even his money, and is only happening as a result of his bad lawsuit that forced another company to shut down, is really disturbing.

from the really-now? dept

We've covered for a while why we think Craigslist made a mistake in suing 3taps and Padmapper over scraping of Craigslist data. Of particular concern were the very bad legal precedents this may set, which tend to be completely contrary to Craig Newmark's own stance on internet freedom (of which he's been a strong supporter). Indeed, the legal arguments made by Craigslist are insulting to those who believe in internet freedom and really put Craigslist in a poor light. 3taps and Padmapper were driving more traffic to Craigslist and enhancing the service -- something that lots of sites on the internet do all the time. And yet they're facing very harsh penalties.

While an initial court ruling found that some of Craigslist's wackier theories didn't apply (e.g. violating the terms of service isn't a CFAA violation and the copyright claims concerning Craigslist posts failed), the latest ruling, unfortunately, finds that the combination of a cease-and-desist letter and merely changing your IP addresscreates unauthorized access to a public website. That's troubling on a variety of levels, mostly because changing an IP address isn't any form of "hacking." It's incredibly easy to do, and in many cases happens automatically without any input from users, if they have a dynamic IP address.

Changing your IP address is simply not hacking. That's because masking your IP address is an easy, common thing to do. And there's plenty of legitimate reasons to do so, whether its to protect your privacy, preserve innovation or avoid price discrimination....

There's a serious potential for mischief that is encouraged by this decision, as companies could arbitrarily decide whose authorization to "revoke" and need only write a letter and block an IP address to invoke the power of a felony criminal statute in what is, at best, a civil business dispute.

Similarly, Orin Kerr, who tends to be more sympathetic about these kinds of cases, finds the use of a mere IP address change to be quite problematic:

Judge Breyer sees IP blocking as sufficient. But it’s unfortunate that Breyer doesn’t give the issue more analysis, as I think it’s a really interesting question. The counterargument runs like this. IP addresses are very easily changed, and most people use the Internet from different IP addresses every day. As a result, attempting to block someone based on an IP address doesn’t “block” them except in a very temporary sense. It pauses them for a few seconds more than actually blocks them. It’s a technological barrier in the very short term but not in the long term. Is that enough to constitute a technological barrer?

Judge Breyer’s opinion appears to mix up two different aspects of the CFAA. The first aspect is the prohibition on unauthorized access, and the second is its associated mental state element of intent. The CFAA only prohibits intentional unauthorized access; merely knowingly or recklessly accessing without authorization is not prohibited. So whatever unauthorized access means, the person must be guilty of doing that thing (the act of unauthorized access) intentionally to trigger the statute. Breyer seems to mix up those elements by focusing heavily on the fact that 3taps knew that Craigslist didn’t want 3taps to access its site. According to Judge Breyer, the clear notice meant that the case before him didn’t raise all the notice and vagueness issues that prompted the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Nosal.

I think this analysis is somewhat misdirected. In my view, the fact that 3taps was on notice that Craiglist did not want them to access the Craigslist website is only relevant to show intent. From that perspective, Judge Breyer should have been clearer that the cease-and-desist letter couldn’t make visiting the website an “unauthorized access.” The letter is just a written statement of the owner’s wishes as to who can visit the site, just like Terms of Service. In my view, whether the facts of the 3taps case amount to an unauthorized access hinges on the circumvention of IP blocking. If so, then the cease-and-desist letter shows that the act of unauthorized access was intentional; if not, then the letter does not have any relevance to the CFAA.

That's really the key point here. The cease and desist is no different than the terms of service -- and yet it's already been stated that violating the terms isn't a CFAA violation. So the real issue here is the changing of an IP address. And the idea that a mere changing of an IP address opens you up to criminal liability is insane. This is a horrible precedent and one that Craigslist and Craig Newmark should be ashamed of, having brought it into this world for no good reason.

from the bad-legacy dept

We've written a few times about Craigslist's unfortunate and misguided lawsuit against 3taps and Padmapper, companies which aggregated Craigslist data, allowing others to build useful services on top of Craigslist, driving additional traffic and usage back to Craigslist. It's upsetting on the basic level that Craigslist is attacking companies that make its data more useful, and it's doubly upsetting given that Craigslist itself is generally such a big supporter of basic internet freedoms and good policy online. To see it so aggressively attack some other innovators -- with very broad and dangerous interpretations of both copyright law and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is immensely troubling. Perhaps more troubling is that the district court initially bought some of Craigslist's expansive arguments on both fronts (while pushing back on the most extreme arguments). Still, the ruling was dangerous on many levels, and now the EFF (which often works with Craigslist on things) has filed an amicus brief arguing against this dangerous interpretation.

Specifically, the EFF is (quite reasonably) concerned about the court's ruling that said because Craigslist sent a cease and desist letter to 3taps, and 3taps changed its IP address and continued visiting Craigslist's site, that it had violated the CFAA -- even though the website was freely available to the public.

The CFAA does not and should not impose liability on anyone who accesses information
publicly available on the Internet. Because the CFAA and Penal Code § 502 imposes both civil and
criminal liability, it must be interpreted narrowly. That means information on a publicly accessible
website can be accessed by anyone on the Internet without running afoul of criminal computer
hacking laws. In the absence of access, as opposed to use, restrictions, Craigslist cannot use these
anti-hacking laws to complain when the information it voluntarily broadcasts to the world is
accessed, even if it is upset about a competing or complementary business.

EFF points out, both in its blog post and in its filing, how much Craigslist itself benefits from an open internet, and why it's not good that it's now fighting against that very principle.

But benefits to this openness remain and Craigslist itself is a notable example of these
benefits. Craigslist provides a popular and wide reaching classified advertising service, allowing
people to post mostly free classified ads that can be seen by anyone anywhere in the world without
charge. Craigslist claims that 60 million people use Craigslist in the United States each month, that
100 million classified ads are posted each month and that the site receives 50 billion page views
per month. It receives 2 million new job postings a month, supports advertisements posted in 13
different languages and has more than 700 local sites in 70 countries. It is one of the 25 most
visited websites in the United States.

Craigslist’s enormous success is a result of its openness: anyone anywhere can access any
of its websites and obtain information about apartments for rent, new jobs or cars for sale. Its
openness means that Craigslist is the go to place on the web for classified ads; it users post on
Craigslist because they know their ads will reach the largest audience.

But what Craigslist is trying to do here is to use the CFAA’s provisions to enforce the unilateral determinations it has made concerning access to its website, an Internet site that it has
already chosen to open up to the general public, attempting to turn a law against computer hacking
into a new tool. But prohibiting access to an otherwise publicly available website is not the type of
harm that Congress intended to be proscribed in the CFAA, and nowhere in the legislative history
is there any suggestion that the CFAA was drafted to grant website owners such unbridled
discretion.

Hopefully the court recognizes the troubles of its earlier ruling, and Craigslist also recognizes the folly of this approach.

from the please-stop-this-craig dept

Craigslist and Craig Newmark, specifically, have been very involved in being good corporate citizens on the internet. Craig was one of the key players in stopping SOPA, and has been involved in a number of other key internet activism campaigns, including the fight against CISPA. That's part of the reason we were so surprised and disappointed last year to see Craigslist seek to abuse both copyright law and the CFAA to go after a couple of sites that added a layer of value on top of Craigslist. The key target seemed to be Padmapper, a site that combined data from Craigslist and other sources to make searches for real estate much more useful (adding maps and other data). Those results did not compete with Craigslist but layered more info on top, driving interested people right back to Craigslist. After Craigslist threatened Padmapper for scraping its site, Padmapper switched to using a third party, 3taps, which had figured out a way to get data from Craigslist, and Padmapper just used that instead.

In response, Craigslist sued them both (and another site that was using 3taps as well) making some highly questionable claims about how this was both copyright infringement and a CFAA violation because it violated its terms of service. The copyright claim seemed particularly bizarre, because Craigslist appeared to be claiming copyright on posts made by others, something that was obviously ridiculous. Making things even more farcical, Craigslist then tried to cover this up with a click through notice on the site telling visitors that when you post on Craigslist you're granting an exclusive license to Craigslist -- meaning you're effectively giving it control over your copyright. After that raised significant backlash, including from the NY Times, Craigslist backed down on that one point.

But the lawsuit itself has continued and the judge recently ruled on the motions to dismiss the lawsuit from 3taps and Padmapper. The ruling is a mixed bag, but mostly bad. First we'll start with the tiny "good" part, though: the court did dismiss the general copyright claims Craigslist was making over everyone's posts on its site (outside that time period discussed above where Craigslist said it wanted an exclusive license).

The meaning of the phrase “You also expressly grant and
assign to [Craigslist] all rights” was the subject of some debate at the hearing on these
motions, but the “all rights” language relates specifically to enforcement rights–not rights to
the content of the posts. The language assigning rights to the content did not use the phrase
“all rights,” and did not specify that the rights granted were “exclusive.” Craigslist provides
no authority for the proposition that an ambiguous grant of rights is presumptively exclusive,
and the Court declines to read that term into the terms that Craigslist itself drafted

Basically, it says that Craigslist's regular terms of service didn't grant Craigslist an exclusive license, which is necessary for a lawsuit over the copyrights.

But, in the long run, that's a small victory. The court does say that Craigslist has a copyright in the "compilation," claiming that adding geographic information is somehow creative.

Craigslist has alleged that its “classified ad service is organized
first by geographic area, and then by category of product or service,” with these categories
organized in “a list designed and presented by craigslist.”... Construing the
relevant allegations in Craigslist’s favor at this early stage in the proceedings, the Court
concludes that Craigslist, in “deciding which categories to include and under what name,”
... “display[ed] some minimal level of creativity,”

Ick. I have trouble seeing how that kind of activity raises to the level of creativity protected by copyright, so hopefully later in the process the court will reject this concept. Now, the next bad part of the ruling: the court says that Craigslist does actually have a valid copyright in the posts for those few short weeks when it had that clickthrough "reminding" people that it had the exclusive right. I still don't see how this is possible, since an exclusive license is supposed to require a written confirmation, not clicking through on an oddly worded "reminder." But, the court twisted some things around to say this is okay. I've read this over a few times and it still doesn't make any sense.

Basically, it says, as noted above, that Craigslist's "regular" terms of use don't grant the necessary exclusive license, but the combination of the terms that don't grant an exclusive license with a "reminder" from Craigslist that it does grant an exclusive license, somehow makes the terms grant an exclusive license. I don't see how that's possible, especially as there's no explicit or written agreement from the user to assign the exclusive license. Even though it was just written as a "confirmation," the court says that "it is reasonable to infer that a Craigslist user would understand that this "confirmation" effected a transfer of rights." But why? How could a statement that is written as if it reminds you of something actually be an official decision to transfer rights? Here's what the reminder specifically said:

Clicking “Continue” confirms that craigslist is the exclusive licensee of this content, with the exclusive right to enforce copyrights against anyone copying, republishing, distributing or preparing derivative works without its consent.

That certainly sounds like a reminder of an existing situation and not an official agreement to transfer rights. But the court seems to think people will realize that clicking that single button is giving up entirely the rights to their own copyrights to Craigslist. That seems ripe for revisiting...

So, if you posted a craigslist ad while this provision was live, you're out of luck. craigslist's ownership claims over user posts could potentially mean that the affected users can’t republish their ads on multiple services without risking a claim of infringement. And while not every craigslist post is going to go viral and have real value outside the original context (like the “Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ” car ad), users still need the right to post and repost their material in a variety of venues. Moreover, the exclusive license provision calls into question craigslist’s compatibility with common licensing schemes, like the Creative Commons ShareAlike license or the GNU Free Documentation License for the time that provision was valid. And, worse still: craigslist’s actions, and the court's ruling, only increases the chance that other websites will start demanding ownership of the content you post there.

So, a tiny bit of good, but a lot bad on the copyright front.

On the CFAA front... it's the same basic story. The court rejects the idea that merely accessing the website is a CFAA violation (thanks to the Nosal ruling). It rejects Craigslist's claims that it was blocking access, rather than uses (which is the core of the Nosal ruling), noting correctly that within Craigslist's terms, all of the restrictions are about uses.

The Court need not decide whether violating “restrictions on access to information”
contained in a website’s terms of use can ever support liability under the CFAA, because
Craigslist’s TOU contain only “use” restrictions, not true “access” restrictions as the term is
used in Nosal. Although the TOU include a section titled “Unauthorized Access and
Activities,” parts of which are framed in terms of “access,” these restrictions depend entirely
on the accessor’s purpose. TOU at 6-7 (prohibiting, e.g., “access to or use of craigslist to
design, develop, test, . . . or otherwise make available any program” that interacts with
Craigslist).

That part is good. But... unfortunately, the CFAA claims stay alive on two counts. First, because Craigslist sent a cease and desist letter, the court says that violating that letter is unauthorized access. That seems extreme and ridiculous in the same way the argument that violating a terms of service violates the CFAA. The second issue is that Craigslist blocked the IP of 3taps... and 3taps (shocker) changed their IP. The court actually argues that changing your IP address when it was blocked is a violation of the CFAA. This is unfortunately similar to one of the arguments made against Aaron Swartz.

Aside from the TOU, however, Craigslist specifically denied authorization to use the
website “for any purposes” in its cease and desist letters, Kao Decl. Ex. A, and also used
technological measures to block access from IP addresses associated with 3Taps, which Craigslist alleges that 3Taps bypassed by using different IP addresses and proxy servers to conceal its identity. Assuming that the CFAA encompasses information
generally available to the public such as Craigslist’s website, Defendants’ continued use of Craigslist after the clear statements regarding authorization in the cease and desist letters and
the technological measures to block them constitutes unauthorized access under the statute.

The EFF points out how ridiculous both of these claims are. On the cease and desist:

Cease and Desist Letters Should Not Make Access to a Website Criminal

The CFAA is both a civil and a criminal statute. This is a civil case, but has criminal ramifications. While the court looked at the earlier Facebook v. Power Ventures case, it misread a key holding. There, the court recognized that imposing criminal liability based on the “receipt of a cease and desist letter would create a constitutionally untenable situation.” This would put too much power in the hands of private parties to decide what a crime would be.

And on the IP address change, EFF points out how changing IP addresses is a common thing that happens all the time:

Changing IP Addresses Is Not Hacking

The court’s ruling on IP address blocking is dangerous because it could criminalize innocent behavior.

[....] There is nothing inherently improper, never mind unlawful, about switching IP addresses and thereby avoiding IP address blocking. Moreover, when a website is available without restriction to the public, a private party should not be able turn access into a crime to back up owner preferences or terms of service with the weight of criminal authority.

Given all that, there are very serious problems with this ruling, and the fact that Craigslist is driving such dangerous precedents is quite upsetting for a company that has been so involved and so at the forefront of helping fight back against such abuses of the law. Over at Freedom to Tinker, Steve Schultze asks Craigslist to dismiss the case with prejudice, and I second that call.

If Craig Newmark and Craigslist move forward with this lawsuit, which has the possibility of creating very dangerous precedents concerning both copyright law and the CFAA, it will do tremendous harm to Craigslist's reputation and standing in the wider internet community. As Schultze notes, moving forward at this point, given the details in the latest ruling will just make Craig look petty and vindictive. I know Craig and he's anything but vindictive and petty. Destroying his reputation and acting out just because a couple of sites tried to make Craigslist more useful? It just doesn't make any sense at all. Hopefully Craig will realize this as well, and will call off his legal attack dogs, and think twice about future lawsuits of this nature.

from the call-off-the-dogs,-craig dept

A few weeks ago, we wrote about the unfortunate news that Craigslist was continuing its old practice of bullying aggregator sites who added value to Craigslist listings and sent more traffic to the site, with a legal threat against the popular real estate site PadMapper. PadMapper takes a variety of real estate listings and adds value to them, such as by adding an embeddable map to show you where it is. However, it still directs the user back to the original. In many ways, it's no different than what something like Google does. Unfortunately, rather than call off the legal dogs, Craigslist has decided to go forward and sue PadMapper, along with 3rd party data provider 3taps. PadMapper had started using data from 3taps, rather than scraping Craigslist directly, on the belief that such a move would get around the legal issues.

The legal filing is below, and as with some of Craigslist's earlier lawsuits, this one raises a bunch of legal issues that are highly questionable. A lawsuit of this nature is much more suited to an old legacy gatekeeper, rather than a company that is supposedly of the internet generation. To say it's disappointing that Craigslist would engage in these kinds of tactics is an understatement.

The key arguments are that these services violate Craigslists' copyrights and trademarks. Neither claim seems particularly strong. In fact, both seem exceptionally weak. The internet would be a much worse place if either claim was found to be correct in court -- and it's surprising that Craig Newmark, who has fought the good fight for internet freedom, including being a major supporter of the Internet Defense League -- would move forward with such claims that could damage the basic workings of the internet.

The copyright claim is an odd one. Most of the content on Craigslist is created by the users, not by Craigslist. The Craigslist terms of use shows that users do not directly assign their copyrights to Craigslist (in fact, they're pretty explicit that "CL does not control, is not responsible for and makes no representations or warranties with respect to any user content"). However, users do provide a rather complete license to the works, including the right to sue over the copying of the work:

You also expressly grant and assign to CL all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against any unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution, use or exploitation of, or creation of derivative works from, any content that you post (including but not limited to any unauthorized downloading, extraction, harvesting, collection or aggregation of content that you post).

In light of the Righthaven debacle in which it was made clear that you cannot assign the bare right to sue, I'm curious if this particular clause is actually enforceable. Perhaps the assigning of "all rights" could be interpreted to mean the actual copyrights were assigned, but it's not that clear.

Either way, I'm still not convinced that the actions in question wouldn't then be covered by fair use. Sites like PadMapper are collecting mostly factual data. In looking around at Padmapper, including a number of Craigslist listings, all of the information provided appears to be factual. Here's an example:

All of the info is factual. It does not include the Craigslist writeup. It just includes information like price, number of bedrooms, bathrooms and location. That information is simply not subject to copyright. Furthermore, it appears to take none of Craigslist's look and feel. To suggest that it's infringement to collect and post that, non-copyrightable, information is ridiculous.

In its complaint, Craigslist points to the actual listings pages, claiming that PadMapper violates its copyright because it displays "misappropriated craigslist content." As far as I can tell that's not true. What PadMapper appears to do is to display actual Craigslist pages, but do so with a frame, showing its own toolbar on the lefthand side. That is, it's not copying Craigslist content or republishing it, but sending users to Craigslist, and providing additional (and quite useful) tools. Example below:

That right hand frame is served from Craigslist itself, not Padmapper.

The claim against 3taps might be a bit stronger, since it runs a site that appears to host content copied from Craigslist -- which 3taps then claims is public domain. That claim is questionable. 3taps CEO, Greg Kidd, told Jeff Roberts at GigaOm "that his company doesn’t “scrape” Craigslist but simply draws on data available on the public internet in the same way that other search engines do." That doesn't make much sense, because the way that other search engines work is to scrape content. Still, considering that search engines are considered legal, one could make an argument that 3taps is no different.

The second major claim in the lawsuit is even weaker. It's a trademark claim against both companies. Again, the argument against 3taps has slightly more credibility, since 3taps runs a (nicely designed) site called "craiggers." However, the site clearly has a tagline stating: "craigslist data, better than craigslist." I think most people would automatically assume, then, that the site has no relationship with Craigslist. When it comes to PadMapper, it's unclear how anyone could possibly be confused. The site is PadMapper and it sends people to Craigslist. There's simply no confusion there at all.

3taps' display of some of the data possibly represents a legal issue, but if any, it's a pretty minor one. It's difficult to see how making the data in Craigslist more useful creates any sort of "harm" for Craigslist at all. The arguments against PadMapper seem laughable to atrocious. Either way, for a company that often presents itself both as a strong defender of internet freedoms and as one that relies on safe harbor rules like the CDA 230, it's disappointing to see Craigslist become a legal bully over other sites who don't take away from Craigslist at all, but rather make the (increasingly out-of-date) site a lot more useful.